Sunday, May 13, 2018

Because you may need to create a new source installation of your Microsoft Office and gather all the necessary security updates, here’s a quick tip extract all *.exe Office updates to the Updates sources folder.

This is particularly useful because most of the time you’ll download the updates on *.exe format and has you may know, the automated install will look for *.msp files inside the Updates folder instead.

So, here are the necessary steps to do it:

For this example we’ll use the folder D:\Temp\10\Office where you’ll put all your downloaded *.exe files and you should create also D:\Temp\10\Office\Updates where the files will be extracted.

Download all your *.exe files and move them to D:\Temp\10\Office

Open a command-line as Administrator

On the command-line, navigate to D:\Temp\10\Office

Know just execute the following command:for %g in (D:\Temp\10\Office\*.exe) do %g /extract:D:\Temp\10\Office\Updates /quiet

All *.msp files will be extracted to D:\Temp\10\Office\Updates and now you just need to copy them to your “OfficeSource\updates”.

Did you ever needed a specific version of Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable to run an application?

I had this issue with VMware Horizon Client 4.7.0 that needed some Visual C++ specific versions to be installed. If not, the installer would install them for me but…rebooted the machine without any kind of warning.

So, thanks to a Jags Blog, we can get the direct links to download a bunch of versions of Visual C++ Redistributable!

When applying a GPO to do this, you must keep in mind that MpsSvc service account is responsible to write down the Windows Firewall log, so, if you change the default location (%windir%\System32\LogFiles\Firewall) you need to give it the right NTFS permissions.

So basically what you need to do:

Change the default location for the Windows Firewall log

Go to the new location

Right-click the folder and then Properties

Click the Security tab and Edit

Now, click Add

Make sure that you’ve select the local computer and not the domain (in “Locations…”)

First things first. There are 3 ways to disable automatic updates. You can choose one of them but…I use all 2 just because we never know if Adobe changes they’re mind about it and one of the ways stops working on next Adobe Reader DC release:

bUpdater

Disables the Updater and removes associated user interface items

Check

Specifies the default time interval in days to check for updates.

Mode

Specifies the Updater’s update mode (manual | automatic)

Now, for the registry keys (that you can apply using Group Policy Preferences for example) here’s what you need:

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

There’s always a gap between Windows 10 Feature Updates launching and the availability of the ISO on VLS but Microsoft made available today through Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center Windows 10 v1803 Enterprise ISO.